A Presbyterian Failure
"The evil is... our system."
Toward the end of his life, an esteemed Presbyterian theologian submitted a journal article calling his beloved tradition to account for their most severe failure. He began his article with these words:
One of the evidences of our Lord’s Messiahship was that the gospel was preached to the poor… In the Old Testament, ‘the poor,’ and ‘the people of God’ are almost equivalent expressions. They constitute much the larger part of mankind. They have the same right to the gospel as other classes of men. It was intended for them as well as for others… [N]o Christian, therefore, has ever doubted that it is the duty of the church to preach the gospel to the poor.
The author continued his sharp rebuke for any church that did not faithfully reach the poor in their midst. He wrote,
It being admitted that it is the duty of the church to preach the gospel to the poor, it must also be admitted that any church which fails to bring the gospel to bear upon the poor, fails in its duty to Christ. It refuses to do what he has specially commanded; and sooner or later its candlestick will be removed out of its place.
There was no doubt, he wrote, that various denominations were failing in their task as a whole. Entire traditions were becoming segregated by socioeconomic class. The theologian observed,
Things seem tending to the result that one denomination will address itself principally to one class, and another to a different. But this is antichristian. No church can afford to systematically and of set purpose to neglect the poor, or, in point of fact, fail to reach them.
Soon, the author boldly and honestly turned his attention to his own beloved tradition:
We are constrained to acknowledge the Presbyterian Church in this country is not the church for the poor… A tiny part of the poor, much smaller than is our proper portion, belong to the Presbyterian Church. We, as a church, are not doing, and never have done, what we were bound to do, in order to secure the preaching of the gospel to the poor.
In other words, while a failure to reach the poor was true in general of Christian churches, it was especially true of the Presbyterian church. This respected theologian argued that the failure was not for lack of zeal or intellect but,
The evil is… our system.
This evil is baked into an ecclesial model, he said, that puts pressure on local churches to take care of their own needs without the support of other congregations. Under such a system, churches were frequently closed by their presbyteries for not being financially “self-sustaining.” Since the Presbyterian Church would not pool collective resources to sustain ministers trying to reach the poor, Presbyterian ministers would only go to communities where they were guaranteed provision by a congregation.
He argued that the inevitable result of such a system is that the poor are left without witness to the gospel in the Presbyterian church. This “great evil,” he said, is most apparent in our cities.
The esteemed theologian to which I have been referring was none other than Charles Hodge,[1] that racist, excuse-making Presbyterian leader whose diseased interpretation of the doctrine of the “spirituality of the Church” defined a century of Presbyterians who adamantly supported racial and economic injustice. Even Hodge, himself a master in an oppressive social and economic system that kept others in bondage, could not deny the Church’s task to reach the poor, nor the distinct failure of the Presbyterian Church to minister to the poor in their midst. Should such failure continue, like the seven churches in Revelation, the Presbyterian Church was in danger of losing the presence and power of Christ.
Hodge’s essay was written over 120 years ago. Has anything changed?
I do not want to discredit the good work of many in the Presbyterian churches to reach the rural and urban poor, neglected immigrant communities, and so on. I have been encouraged by how much attention has recently been given to reaching these communities in my denomination, the PCA. While not denying their meaningful work, the numbers do not lie. Presbyterians in the United States remain among the wealthiest and most educated in this country.[2]
We ought not to apologize for this privilege (unless, of course, our privileges are acquired through injustice). However, we must ask ourselves, “What will we do now with our privileges to fulfill Christ’s command to minister to the poor in our midst? Will we stay in our comfortable silos of wealth and privilege? Or will our individual, indeed our congregational and denominational budgets, take up the call to reach the least of these as Christ commanded? Will we store treasures for ourselves on earth, or will we store up treasures in heaven by giving what we have to the poor?”[3]
A vital mark of the Reformed tradition is a willingness to self-critique and call our tradition to a higher standard, the Scriptures, for the sake of Christ and the good of his people. As it turns out, there is a long history of great pastors and theologians who have taken up the cause of condemning the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition for its failure to reach the poor and the oppressed. In every age, there have been those who have called our tradition to confess and correct our failure to be faithful to Christ by ministering to the poor.
Will we listen?
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was well-known for his general critiques of the Reformed churches, particularly in their failure to address the miseries of the poor and working classes. He called Reformed pastors to no longer stay silent about the “Word of the Lord concerning the needy but to put the trumpet to their lips and proclaim his holy gospel also with a view to our earthly circumstances.”
In fact, Kuyper questioned how many professing Christians were faithfully following Christ:
Actually, it is shocking and outrageous the way that prevailing conditions and personal relationships in our Christian society blaspheme the person and word of our blessed Savior. After all, also on the paths of social life he has left us an example, so that we can walk in his footsteps. Of how many Christians among us can it be truly said that also in social respects they are followers of their Savior? [4]
In Kuyper’s view, the church's task was to join Christ in taking sides against the rich and powerful for the sake of the suffering and oppressed.[5]
Theologian Klaas Schilder (1890-1952), a contemporary of Kuyper, criticized the Reformed churches for their “gross egoism” that “deprived the poor person of the necessities of life” by supporting economic policies that drive up the cost of goods. This is why Schilder taught that when God’s judgment comes, it will strike first in the church, for these horrors in the church offend God much more than those outside the church.
The Reformed missionary and professor J.H. Bavinck (1895-1964) recognized a colonizing mindset among ministers and missionaries who tended toward propagating “extremely dangerous elements” of Western culture in their ministry. Every minister, he wrote, “must be critical of his own life and of the culture of which he always carries with him.”[6] This, he observed, was especially true of White ministers and churches in cross-cultural contexts.[7]
From within the oppression of South African apartheid at the hands of the Dutch Reformed Churches, a prophetic and vocal minority boldly stood against the Reformed churches in their failure to actually be Reformed in any meaningful sense of the word. John de Gruchy, for example, said that the problem in South Africa “has not been Calvinism, but rather, with some notable exceptions, the absence of a true Reformed theology.”[8] True Reformed theology that stands in the tradition of John Calvin, de Gruchy argued, is the proto-type for anything meaningfully called liberative theology. However, many forms of Reformed theology today need to be “liberated from various captivities, not least that of dominating social groups and ideologies.”[9]
The Black South African Allan Boesak, likewise, produced many liberative works while living under the oppression of apartheid. He believed his resistance to the oppression of the Dutch Reformed Churches made him the true inheritor of the Reformed faith. He was right. Boesak wrote,
Manipulation of the word of God to suit culture, prejudices, or ideology is alien to the Reformed tradition. But the way in which Reformed Christians in this country have used the Bible to justify black oppression and white privilege, the way in which the gospel has been bypassed in establishing racially divided churches, the way in which scripture has been used to produce a nationalistic, racist ideology, is the very denial of the Reformed faith belief in the supremacy of Scripture.[10]
The respected Reformed philosopher and theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff has also discovered the liberating themes of the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition and our failure to live them out. He has lamented a “profound discontent over my tradition’s loss of its radicalism” and how the tradition can even tend toward being “oppressively conservative.”[11] Still, those who believe God stands on the side of the poor and the oppressed will find ample resources to bring about social and economic justice within the Reformed tradition.[12]
Harvie Conn (1933-1999) was a respected missionary, an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), and a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. His ministry was a prophetic one, as he called the Presbyterian and Reformed churches of his day to give an account for their failure to reach the poor. One could say that this was a dominant theme in his teaching and preaching. In one place, for example, he criticized the Reformed tradition for becoming “merely” conservative rather than truly Reformed:
This new twist is not frequently called Calvinism or the Reformed faith. It is more often called conservative theology… Conservative theology is often institutionalized, bureaucratic theology. It is also isolated theology. It becomes isolated from the future by consolidation with the past; hesitates to engage in creative theology because of its proper fear of destructive theology; fears the left wing and the right wing and so remains on dead center; discusses theology rather than lives theology…
Conservative theology is defensive theology. It guards rather than promotes, retrenches rather than advances, commands by word rather than by example. What does it leave us? Preaching without large vision and reforming conviction; leadership from the politicians instead of from the prophets; revivals without reformation; $10,000 church buildings with $1 programs; disillusioned college students… congregations showing their emptiness…[13]
In his most well-known work, Conn criticized our churches for offering no consolation for the poor in how they have been sinned against. Such a hollow message “conveys too much superiority, condescension, yes even pity, to be credible.”[14] Elsewhere, having asked why Reformed theologians so often miss an emphasis on the poor in their great works of theology, he gives his own answer: “[Our theologians] don’t know what it means to be poor.”[15]
The Reformed and Neo-Calvinist theologian Craig Bartholomew has confessed that those who follow Kuyper’s ideals have failed to hear his call to bring justice to the poor in our midst. “Most Western Christians seem quite content with this situation.” Our only path forward, if we are to be true to Jesus and our tradition, is to take sides with the poor in their oppression.[16]
Each of these theologians represents only a sample of what is present in the prevalent self-criticism within the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition regarding our failure to reach the poor and the oppressed. These theologians intuited a trajectory set by John Calvin (1509-1564), who said,
But the Church of Christ is composed of poor men, and nothing could be farther removed from dazzling or imposing ornament. Hence many are led to despise the Gospel, because it is not embraced by many persons of eminent station and exalted rank. How perverse and unjust that opinion is, Christ shows from the very nature of the Gospel, since it was designed only for the poor and despised.[17]
Does our gospel console the poor and confront the strong? Or are the rich and powerful far too comfortable among us, to the extent that the “poor and despised” feel rejected from our midst?
Tim Keller (1950-2023) once wrote,
Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.[18]
There is no doubt Western churches fail to minister to the poor. However, if we are to be honest with the statistics, our tradition, and the Scriptures, we must confess that this failure is emphatically true of the Presbyterian churches. If Presbyterian and Reformed churches are not reaching the poor as Jesus did and commanded, then ought we not come to a similar conclusion?
Are we believing, practicing, and declaring the same message that Jesus did?
This platform exists, in part, for those who share a discontent with the failure of our churches to reach the poor and oppressed. If that is a burden you share, then I want to invite you to stick around with me as we explore what it looks like to join our theological predecessors in summoning our churches to something better and more beautiful.
Finally, a word of courage to all my friends who have been pushed out of Presbyterian and Reformed spaces because of your heart for the poor and oppressed:
You were the true heirs of the Reformed faith all along.
[1] Charles Hodge, Preaching the Gospel to the Poor, Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, Vol. 43, No. 1 (1871), pp. 83-95. Seven years prior, Hodge’s contemporary, one Joshua Hall McIlvaine, wrote a similarly condemning essay in the Princeton Review. he wrote, “From the prevalence of this evil, it seems to us that the greatest calamities to our beloved branch of the church are to be apprehended. The great calamity to be feared by us, is barrenness and dearth in our own spiritual life, and consequent apostasy. For whenever the church comes to be generally deserted by the poor, not only does she fail to demonstrate her Divine mission to the world, but also, and no less to her own members. The church that is abandoned by the poor, must soon be abandoned by the Lord.” The Relation of the Church to the Poor, Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, Vol. 34, No. 4 (1864), 623.
[2] Ryan Burge, The Socioeconomic Status of American Religious Traditions,
.
[3] John Calvin, Institutes, 3.18.6. “If we believe heaven is our country, it is better to transmit our possessions thither than to keep them here where upon our sudden migration they would be lost to us. But how should we transmit them? Surely by providing for the needs of the poor.”
[4] Abraham Kuyper, Christ and the Needy, The Journal of Markets and Morality, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2011), pp. 647-683.
[5] Abraham Kuyper, The Problem of Poverty, 62.
[6] J.H. Bavinck, An Introduction to the Science of Missions, 107.
[7] Bavinck, Introduction, 191.
[8] John de Gruchy, Liberating Reformed Theology, 34.
[9] John de Gruchy, Toward a Reformed Theology of Liberation in “Toward the Future of Reformed Theology” (eds. David Willis and Michael Welker), 106.
[10] Allan Boesak, Black and Reformed, 90.
[11] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace, ix.
[12] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Hearing the Call: Liturgy, Justice, Church and World (eds. Mark Gornik and Gregory Thompson), 276.
[13] Harvie M. Conn, Contemporary World Theology, 143-144.
[14] Harvie M. Conn, Evangelism: Doing Justice and Preaching Grace, 44-56.
[15] Harvie Conn, The New Testament and the Poor, Lecture 7 (1981). http://media2.wts.edu/media/audio/hc605_lecture_07-copyright.mp3.
[16] Craig Bartholomew, Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition, 212.
[17] John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew 11:1-6 and Luke 7:18-23
[18] Tim Keller, The Prodigal God, 16.